'To me, personally, parliament is everything; the members are the staunchest friends man ever had; the life combines the mental gymnastics of college with the fresh wind of the outer world … The man who steps into the English parliament takes his place in a pageant that has ever been filing by since the birth of English history." So spoke the interwar MP, Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, on his time in the House of Commons. Today, Westminster's reputation is at its lowest ebb for a generation as MPs are cowed by the expenses scandal, outmanoeuvred by an overmighty executive and patronised by a publicity-hungry Speaker.

All of which makes next week's publication of the History of Parliament particularly timely. These seven new books covering the years 1820-1832 open up a strangely familiar epoch of scandal, bribery, gerrymandering and venality that would shock even the committee on standards in public life. But unlike today's parliamentarians, the 1832 MPs proved confident enough to confront their crisis of legitimacy.

A new History of Parliament publication is a remarkable event in its own right. This 28-volume chronicle of Westminster, covering 17,000 MP biographies stretching back to 1386, has rightly been described by historian David Cannadine as "the most detailed, authoritative and comprehensive account" of any legislature in the world. Its inspiration lay with Wedgwood's conviction that the history of England was the history of liberty, as embodied in the history of parliament. The first volumes, published in 1936 against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, set out unapologetically to show how, "five hundred years before our day … the foundations of freedom were laid by Englishmen".

After the second world war, the project was taken over by the great parliamentary historian Sir Lewis Namier. If Wedgwood had sought to tell the story of ever-widening liberty, Namier was more interested in digging up the dirt as he revealed a web of Westminster intrigue and dependency, family loyalties and dubious affiliations. In volume after volume, the religious, social and regional background of parliamentarians was laid bare as the only way of understanding their decision-making, based primarily on self-interest. "The social history of England could be written in terms of the membership of the House of Commons," Namier grandly declared. But the effect of his analysis was to elevate the importance of MPs' personal preferences above any political philosophy.

And when it comes to the 1820s one can see why. This was a period of corruption in British public life which makes the arms-to-Iraq, sleaze, cash-for-honours and expenses scandals pale into insignificance. William Cobbett called it simply The Thing – a monstrous mix of financial, imperial, and political chicanery. The radical polemicist John Wade wrote his bestselling Black Book; Or Corruption Unmasked, detailing the "places, pensions and sinecures" pocketed by the clergy, judiciary, civil list royals, and Bank of England placemen. Included in it was a "correct list of both Houses of Parliament; Showing their Family Connections, Parliamentary Influence, the Places and Pensions held by themselves or Relations". A modern reprint would most certainly feature the Derek Conway tribe.

The new History of Parliament fully sanctions Wade's critique. The election commissioner, Richard Mawrey QC, recently criticised a Birmingham poll as worthy of "a banana republic" for its misuse of postal votes, but a proper rotten borough was 1820s Ludlow, where the Tory peer Lord Powis had ensured there was no contested election for 100 years. Or Downton, where the Earl of Radnor was as sure of his handful of voters returning his candidate as he was of "my footman's answering the bell when I ring".

And if Labour MPs fear the elusive "foreign" billionaire Lord Ashcroft is exerting undue influence over the upcoming general election then they should read up on the much-hated "nabobs" of the 1820s. These imperial profiteers grown fat on "Asiatic luxury" sought to climb up the social scale by buying into parliament. Not for them Lord Ashcroft's key seats campaign, but a blatant purchase of a seat like Old Sarum by the East India Company merchant James Alexander for a not inconsiderable £41,675. The Earl of Pembroke was another non-dom peer, controlling the seat of Wilton with an iron fist – but from France, rather than Belize, Ashcroft's choice.

Bribery, of course, was common, with both Barnstaple and Liverpool being notorious for ballot bungs. William Ewart's election in Merseyside in 1830 cost him £22,360 for 1,300 votes; in Bridport it was £30 a vote. There were no limitations on employing family then. David Cameron's ambition to swamp the Commons with aristocratic Etonians has some way to go before it can rival the 141 younger sons of peers who sat as MPs in the 1820s. The Russell family alone had seven members – which certainly puts the Bottomleys into perspective.

But there was also hope. If the Regency period lacked such a dogged freedom of information campaigner as Heather Brooke, there were pioneering reformers who used the legal system to open up the worst rotten boroughs to freer and fairer elections. Similarly, the decade saw the rise of the extra-parliamentary pressure group. Jubilee 2000 and the Child Poverty Action Group have little on those 1820s non-government organisations petitioning MPs for the abolition of slavery, an end to the death penalty and parliamentary reform.

No doubt each political party will cherry-pick from this epic account. The Tories will look keenly on the abolition of rotten boroughs as they seek to eliminate seats in post-industrial cities with collapsing population levels. The Lib Dems can also highlight the iniquities of the electoral system as their long march to proportional representation grinds on. And as the Labour party sees the establishment turn against it, it can certainly take some lessons from this chronicle of unaccountable power in action.

However, it would be far more useful if parliament as an institution ingested this history. For the response of 1830s MPs to widespread outrage was not to blame the media or outsource their troubles to a quango, it was reform. The first Reform Bill was introduced in 1831, with John Russell warning of the "growing want of confidence" in "public men". He feared a widening breach between government and "the great mass of the weight and intelligence of the country". After serious rioting, a snap election and a threat to flood the Lords with Whig peers, the Great Reform Bill was carried in June 1832. Out went rotten boroughs, aristocratic dominance and blatant corruption; in came an expanded electorate and a changing class of MPs.

The Reform Act failed to allow women the vote, excluded the working class, and could not eliminate venality; but it set in train the slow transformation of the Commons into a democratic and accountable body. What this new history reveals so starkly is the desperate need, in a similar era of public distrust and contempt, for another reformation in Westminster so that parliament can resume its place in Wedgwood's heroic pageant.